We went to the mall on Sunday, mostly because it was officially Too Damn Hot For Life outside and had run out of other indoor time-killing options. Life lesson time, boys: If you get bored, just go somewhere and buy shit you don't need for awhile.

Anyway. The lights flickered once. Twice. We decided to leave, let the power go out and lead to mass looting at Build-a-Bear. We noticed it was raining really hard through the skylights, but by the time we got outside the sun was shining again.

The only evidence that a tornado had touched down nearby was...well, there were a lot of leaves all over the ground.

Oh. And shit like this:

That brownish...thing? That's the underside of a really big tree that just up and fell over. It peeled off a nice layer of the earth's crust and mantle on its way down, and yes I said MANTLE because BOO-YAH GEOLOGY 101. Preparing me for moments like this and not much else.

(My drive-by cell-phone photography skillz: YOU LOVE THEM.)

Not surprisingly, we lost power as a result of the storm. As did over 300,000 other homes in our area, which I swear is like, an actual high-density area where actual real people live and work and DVR their favorite TV shows and poop using fancy modern indoor plumbing, as opposed to McHillbillyville, USA or something. I get the sense that Pepco power lines are held together by little more than popsicle sticks and electrical tape and chewed-up gum from all the third-party contractors they hire EVERY TIME we get one of these huge county-wide outages, and each repair leaves everything a bit more rickety and outage-prone than it was in the first place.

Last time it took 84 hours for our power to be restored. This time we only lost power for about 53 hours. Fifty-three! That's nothing! And the temperatures during the day were only about 90, 91 degrees tops. I don't even see the point in blogging about any of it. What do you take me for, some kind of whiny brat urbanite with no coping skills, or something?

(DON'T ANSWER THAT.)

Unlike the winter outage, this one at least wasn't...scary, like we all going to contract pneumonia and then get into a terrible car accident when we try to drive to the hospital for medicine for our pneumonia because our fingers fell off from frostbite already scary. This outage was mostly boring and sweaty.

Amy: New rule of thumb, Noah. If something 1) lights up, 2) has buttons, or 3) is at all possibly remotely fun, it requires power, and you can't do it right now.

Noah: Okay. Can I play with your phone?

(And yet, just a few hours later, after the boys were in bed and Jason and I prepared to watch a DVD on his charged-at-work laptop, I totally went I KNOW! We can still catch the Mad Men premiere! You just have to rent it on iTunes or something! Why don't you do that? What? Oh. Right. Never mind. Yeah, we can just watch Idiocracy again, I guess.)

I kept trying to get work done at the coffeeshops and such, but so did everyone else from the 300,000+ powerless households. On Monday I drove to Jodi's house to bask in her recently-restored electricity, only to have it go out again after an hour and a half ("HAAAAA SO LONG SUCKER," I cackled as I left, gaining strength for future evil superdeeds from her misfortune).

On Tuesday I brought a big-ass wall outlet splitter with me and very politely asked a woman hogging an entire precious outlet with both her laptop and cell phone if she minded if we expanded the outlet's use for everybody, and...actually, it turned out she DID mind, a little bit, as she testily informed me that Panera had "a lot of other outlets" so she "didn't see the point" in using the splitter. When I mentioned that the plugs were actually all full and a bit more in demand than usual because of the power outages, she was like, "power outawhah?" but finally unplugged her shit for 10 measly seconds, then purposely replugged everything in so her chargers covered up more than one plug, just so no one else could use them. I did not like that lady, very much, and thought to myself that she deserved to get blogged about. So. There.

(Our power came back on last night, but I brought the splitter again today because there are still thousands of people still waiting for theirs. I was heralded as the Smartest, Nicest Person Ever. Which is MORE LIKE IT, INGRATES.)

Anyway. What the outage lacked in DRAMAZZZ, though, it certainly made up in DOLLAH BILLZ, because this is the current state of our once-packed freezer:

Okay, for dinner tonight, your menu choices are grated cheddar cheese, some fancy farmers' market flour that you have to keep in the freezer for some reason, a plastic ice pack and those weird flaxseed/spelt waffles that nobody likes.

Me, too. We got our power back today around 1:30, so that makes what? something like 70 hours. It didn't suck TOO bad until today, when it got really humid again. And when I opened my fridge and freezer to smell the horror.

We were able to have a cookout at my parents (who had power in the neighborhood across the street) with all the meat from our freezer which was thawing out overnight. We invited my sis's and bro's families too, cause there was a lot of meat going bad. When everyone thanked us, we said, "This was on Pepco. Thank them." Grrr.

The storms have been incredible here too. Mah neighborhood started flooding, before it reached my house, I just ran into the street and started waving my arms about like a crazy person. Not because it did any good, just because.

Not to be smug or anything, but here in McHillbillyville, GA, our power rarely goes out. And when it does our wonderful power company has it back on within a couple of hours. Reason #2,467 why I don't live in a high population area.

You probably have to keep the flour in the freezer to keep out weevils - meaning they don't process the crap out of it like regular flour. I keep all flour and pasta in the freezer (which I believe I started doing after your weevil fest).

Dunno why it took me this long to realise that you live in the same area as a friend of mine . . . your winter was full of the exact same snow as hers, and their family just got power back, too. They had to throw out a lot of food.

I promise she would not have been the lady who took up all the outlets.

I apologize if you thought of this but weren't able to get it because the people in the 299,999 other homes got there but dry ice works wonders. When our fridge went out we kept it cold for days until the new one could be delivered. I think it was four or five days. We had to replace the dry ice every so often. The packages give instructions on how much you need per cubic foot. FYI for the next time this happens (hopefully you'll never need it).

We have the power go out a lot here in the center of the US but it's usually back on within hours. BUT, my whole family freaks out except me. Everyone is like "What are we going to do now? I can't watch TV, or get on the computer or ANYTHING!" I always give the "You know, people didn't always have electricity and they found things to do somehow." speech. They don't give a shit, they still whine. The world will end in darkness and boredom.

You guys have the worst luck with outages! Glad it's back on now :-) Apparently, my freezer felt left out of the power outage vacation all the other freezers in the region were getting. It quit working Friday afternoon and we were just able to get it fixed yesterday. Lots of food wasted...boo :-(

Dude, 50-something hours?! When I lived in the UK that would have been OUTRAGEOUS and the power company would have ben forced to compensate people. I'm pretty sure it's legislated as a Health & Safety requirement to have power to homes.

Now I' in Back Of Beyond, New Zealand, *maybe* for the more rural areas they'd have blackouts for more than a day or two. But... dude. That's a country where sheep outnumber PEOPLE.

Nothing is worse! Everything I like to do in life requires electricity. We get outages here in Florida from tropical storms and I just sit there wringing my hands until it comes back on.

My week has been much less stressful, we only lost our air conditioning during the HOTTEST WEEK EVER when our normal 92s and 93s were 99s and 100s and oh, the huma...humidity! I live in a high rise, so we had 90 households that were steaming. After three days someone had the bright idea to call a TV station, and since it was a slow news day they sent a van out, and voila! Within an hour the management of the building had rented hotel rooms for us all for two days! That was horrible too, bad beds, bad pillows, no comforts of home, and having to commute an extra 8 miles to work, but it was better than totally melting.

I saw that very same overturned tree when my daughter and I spent much of Monday (her 19th birthday) at the mall (I guess we go to the same mall). We got our power back on after only 40 hours. I actually enjoyed it -- my kitchen cupboards have never been so organized -- but no one else I've talked to liked it much.

Did you call 911? I'm an emergency medical/police dispatcher, and we dispatch for 5 counties in a pretty rural, spread-out state. When there's an outage, everyone (thousands and thousands of people) calls 911 to tell us about it. I just wonder if it's a local thing, or if it's just the people around here... Also, glad you're back on. Being without power makes my tummy tickle all nervous-like.

Hee! I'll never forget the hurricane of 2004, when the power went out in Gaitherburg BEFORE THE FIRST RAINDROP OR GUST OF WIND APPEARED and remained off for four days. Pepco's infrastructure is, indeed, made up of duct tape and bubble gum. Either that, or they're in league with the Simon people, because of course the malls had power.